Quotes About Mathematics

Ian Malcolm, how do you do? I do maths." He

But from my point of view, such an undertaking is impossible. The mathematics are so self-evident that they don't need to be calculated. It's rather like my asking you whether, on a billion dollars in income, you had to pay tax. You wouldn't need to pull out your calculator to check. You'd know tax was owed. And, similarly, I know overwhelmingly that one cannot successfully duplicate nature in this way, or hope to isolate it.

theoretician, his reputation secured in probability-density functions

In the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative the conclusion we draw therefrom….

New Growth Theory argued, in abstruse mathematics, that wealth came from the human imagination. Wealth wasn't chiefly having more of old things; it was having entirely new things. 'Growth is just another word for change

Take a piece of paper and fold it in half, then fold it in half again, for a total of 50 times folding it in half. If a piece of paper is 0.004 inches thick to begin with, by the time you fold it 50 times, it is more than 70 million miles thick.

In mathematics we have long since drawn the rein, and given over a hopeless race.

I love music. I do play. It's like mathematics, and it's also emotional. It's nice to play, for no other reason than just to play.

There was a footpath leading across fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.

As a student, frustrated by the limitations of conventional mathematics, he invented an entirely new form, the calculus, but then told no-one about it for twenty-seven years5.

It is mildly disconcerting to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history—the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest—has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather.

Bayes's theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes's theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions—or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called.

We are very lucky, it appears, to get any good weather at all. Even less well understood are the cycles of comparative balminess within ice ages, known as interglacials. It is mildly unnerving to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history—the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest—has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather.

journal Science in 1980 contending that women are genetically inferior at mathematics.

The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.

times weaker. This can be expressed with the formula

Today's mathematics is intimately bound up with two key areas of human knowledge and activity: the natural world, and the society in which we live.

Sceptic, mathematician, Christian; doubt, affirmation, submission.

Just as we talk of poetic beauty, so we should also talk of mathematical beauty and medicinal beauty. But we do not talk like that for the very good reason that we know what the object of mathematics is, namely proof; and what the object of medicine is, namely cure; but we do not know what constitutes the attraction which is the object of poetry.

And thus, by combining the uncertainty of chance with the force of mathematical proof and by the reconciliation of two apparent opposites, she derives her name from both of them and rightfully assumes the wonderful name of Mathematics of Chance!

The Golden Proportion, sometimes called the Divine Proportion, has come down to us from the beginning of creation. The harmony of this ancient proportion, built into the very structure of creation, can be unlocked with the 'key' ... 528, opening to us its marvelous beauty. Plato called it the most binding of all mathematical relations, and the key to the physics of the cosmos.

I always thought that explained it: the romance is a reaction from the algebra. I never knew a person connected with mathematics or astronomy or statistics, or any of those exact things, who didn't have a crazy streak in 'em SOMEwhere.

I should say the summit of contemporary university knowledge in two fields, mathematics and the humanities. That's no joke!

It was the great Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann who first recognized that social behavior could be analyzed as games.